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" It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength. "

Meghan O'Rourke

Strength

Fall

Easy

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" Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail. "

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" But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone. "

" A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother. "

" I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person. "

" I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was. "

" The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head. "

" If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. "

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" To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow. "

" My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them. "

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